Call it outbound lead generation, demand generation, cold calling, outreach, outbound marketing – my passion has centered around systematizing the process of reaching out to people we don’t know, engaging them in conversation, getting them excited about making change, and wooing them to become one of our best clients.

That’s where I am today…

Here’s where I’ve been and what I’ve been doing over the last 25 years (Visual of my credentials is located here)…

I started out as a Systems Engineer for a think tank in Los Angeles developing Operating System software. I liked speaking with clients, interpreting what they wanted and passing requests along to the development teams. I moved from development into product marketing.

I upgraded my skills and started supporting sales teams in disruptive technology. I worked with firms mostly located south of San Francisco, CA. Analog to digital phone systems – voice, data and 1MB Ethernet over twisted pair wire. Fun stuff. Unfortunately, salespeople struggled in selling disruptive technologies; management fired them all and bumped the System Engineers into sales.

Sales was tough. New market, new technology, nobody understood what we did. After a time of banging my head against a wall, I started applying my process background to sales. It worked. I developed an outbound content management system & managed my leads and contacts via a database.

Fast forward a couple of years, and I started my own company specializing in outbound lead generation process (leadgen 1.0). I developed direct-response client-server technology for healthcare and financial services using direct-mail, phone & faxes for our content. The software allowed clients to track conversion rates at every step in the sales process. Clients I serviced included the likes of UPS, NY Telephone, BCTel, Healthnet, FHP, MasterCard, Pacific Bell, Apple (Mexico), Deloitte, Bose and 1-800-Orkin.

Continuing to add to my outbound sales process expertise, I developed call queueing software for a 100-seat outbound lead generation call center that I co-owned (and sold). For those of you who’ve worked with me and are learning the concept of queues, that technology is re-purposed from predictive dialer systems used for outbound lead generation. We generated appointments for companies like Pacificare, SCAN Health Plan, Prudential Insurance, AAA and Ameritech.

Bob Kelly (see below) is someone I’ve worked for since my early 30′s. He’s an expert in the human side of sales (salespeople, comp plans, methodology, positioning, etc.).

In 2009, Bob hired me to develop LeadGen 2.0 for HyperQuality, a services company located in Seattle. In researching tools, I found Aaron Ross of Pebblestorm and began to learn the outbound process he developed for Salesforce.

We co-produced a book called Predictable Revenue and started working with clients. I soon realized that the process was incomplete. It was missing the entire side of direct response. Clients who hadn’t figured out that content, whether for inbound or outbound, drives behavior and therefore movement down the pipeline, were struggling to create anything predictable. The conveyor belt was in, but the specialized tools (that is, content) was missing or meaningless.